The gold leaf. [volume] (Henderson, N.C.) 1881-1911, 1887-02-24
$50 NJ E w D EATHE R
That the Present Winter Brings.
The Good "Deacon Salisbury Denoun-
ces the Article Furnished by the
Weather Bureau.
FALL River Advanced

/ ran RlFcF AQFdnCe-I
| Variety is the spice of life, as it is
the strong weakness of the present win
ter-a winter that will long be remem
bered for its reliable unreliability, its
steady lack of settled weather and its
general cussedness in setting all pre-
dictions at defiance. 1t has been a
'swinter of discontent" to the suffering
public, but 'sglorious summer" to the
golosh maker, the rubber boot manu-
facturer, the umbrella architect, the
arctic overshoe miscreant, the rubber
cloak fend and the man who makes
sscongh no more" remedies which are
warranted to case the bronchial tubes
even if the undertaken has to vouch for
the positive cures which they perform.
Over in the cold country where
fogs, rains, drizzle, sleet and snow are
component parts of a bright and crisp
winters day, and where the proverb
tells the wise man who goeth out upon
fine morning to abe sure and take
his umbrella along, and, on wet morn
ings to please himself about doing SO, !"
they would find it difficult to put their
finger upon the record of a winters
weather more broken-up and dissipa-
ted than the one which Fall River
people are enjoying (?) in this year of
grace. They may be able to point to
winters when the rainfall or the snow
fall has been greater, when the melodi-
Gus fog horn has had to toot its soul
corroding strains with more exasper-
ating regularity, or when greater av-
erage of umbrellas have been worn to
the bone, but we defy them to produce
one winter in which there has been
more snow, rain, thaw, slippery slop-
piness, bad temper and brimstoned ad-
jectives per day and per square yard
than there has been between Globe
Village and Steep Brook. And as it
is the money that talks we have a
plugged quarter that says SO.
And if there is certainty that the
winter, SO far as it has gone thunder
ing down the ages, has not been one
in which any long continued stretch
of extreme cold has borne with cruel
hardness upon the poor (who buy their
coal by the half ton and have the
whole of two hundred pound team
ster weighed with their load y just
think of the sorrow it has brought to
the heart of the innocent plumber and
the grief which it has twined around
the heartstrings of the suffering ice
man. The plumber has hardly ever
been able to get his tools together to
tackle job, but the weather has got in
ahead of him and spoiled his little
bill. Pipes that were frozen fast
thawed faster ere he could put his
hand upon them; others that had burst
with the sudden thaw, froze hard and
fast again as soon as the rattle of his
soldering iron was heard upon the
premises, and his prospects for being
able to charge for solder at silver rates
and to book the time of his apprentice
at a price that Jay Gould would be
glad to earn, are being ruthlessly shat
tered by the sledge hammer of an ir-
responsible and erratic thermometrlc
influence So too with the noble ice
man whose weights get lighter as the
days get warmer and whose twenty
pound lump in early slr.ng is ten
times as large as when it has been
shrunk by the heat of sunmer-even if
he is making the air sulpherous with
his observations upon the patch work
quality of the weather, which rarely
permits him to harvest crop unless
he has his ice plow'upon raft and his
horses are capable swimmers.
And just consider the hackman
"who neither tolls nor spins and who,
before he turns out mornings, has to
make elaborate calculations whether to
take out his Understanding Carriage
upon wheels or runners. What must
he think of the weather we have been
do-ed with? Is it any wonder that
he begins to feel ugly, smell mouldy
and have a suspicious rednesS about
the region of the nose? And then
again there are the street car drivers
and conductors. Try to imagine what
they have had to go through: Wind,
rain, snow, sunshine, blizzard and
black frost have bothered them. Storm
time, doubled-up teams, frozen or sop
| py reins, ill-tempered passengers,
splashing or sliding horses, lost tracks,
buried switches, long hours and frozen
fingers and noses have fallen to their
lot, and heroes, as they are, they have
never lost their tempers even when for
| the seventy seventh time in day, some
helpless and aimless lunatic has stop
ped their car under an idea that it was
going somewhere quite opposite to that
! in which it was headed. We would
not be a Car driver for all the wealth
of Brayton. We should have mur-
der upon our soul too soon. We should